I’ve said before that my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie is “Shadow of a Doubt,” a 1943 thriller about a serial murderer of widows and the curious relation between him and his loving niece.

But what I didn’t know was that back in the 1940s and ’50s, radio plays were regularly done using popular films as the script. So I’m searching through YouTube for clips on “Shadow of a Doubt” and I find this:

I don’t know who Betsy Drake was, but Cary Grant as Uncle Charlie is an amazing find. He was in four Hitchcock movies (“Suspicion,” Notorious,” North by Northwest” and “To Catch a Thief) but it was so odd to hear him doing Joseph Cotten’s role. And even better, Hitchcock is the director!

And just as I was wowed by this version from the 1950s, I find another version done in 1944, several years earlier:

William Powell, “The Thin Man” of all people, is Uncle Charlie. And Teresa Wright, who played young Charlie in the movie a year earlier, is of course, a great choice. The director is Cecil B. DeMille (I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille) the master of monumental movies.

It’s really hard to give simple sound-bite answers about past mistakes. The question, would you go back and undo your errors is unanswerable. It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.

Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.

Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.

It’s that shiny object that shows up to distract us from things that matter. And in the whole cosmic scheme of things, everything matters more than this does.

OK, so the Patriots deflated their balls and it’s illegal.

So why does the NFL let teams supply their own balls? If it’s such a big deal, shouldn’t the league be in charge of the balls?

OK, so the Patriots have cheated in the past.

So why did the NFL punishment for those incidents have all the impact of a mosquito biting a sperm whale? The Pats still make the playoffs and still end up in the Super Bowl.

OK, so the cheating in a playoff game allowed them to get into the most recent Super Bowl.

So if that’s the case, strip the Patriots of their Super Bowl title. If the NFL isn’t going to do that, shut up already! As far as the league is concerned, it pays to be a cheat (and a wife beater, and a.

And Deflategate is a stupid name. The -gate suffix is now a cliche. Call it something daring, like “Ballbusting.”